Untitled
by Faermage-KH Junkie
Summary: Sixty-four. Thiry-two, sixteen… four, one. Almost finished, now...
1. Untitled

_Before you ask, yes, this is completely and totally freaking creepy on purpose. Whether or not a sequel ends up existing is up to my fickle muse. Fun fact: before I started writing, this was not supposed to be fanfiction; it just... ended up that way. ~Miri_

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><p>Sixty-four. Thiry-two, sixteen… four, one. She wrote the corresponding digits, moving onto the next set, then the next. Ones and zeroes danced before her eyes, moving through her brain in a wave of numbers in a special code that only she understood. She spoke the same language as those numbers, understood what they meant and understood <em>them, <em>the thoughts expressed in only two numbers, one and zero, as she worked along. Red hair escaped a braid in wisps, but her mind wasn't here in this realm; she spoke in the back of her mind to that stream running beneath her own consciousness, a stream that spoke in words that were only masks laid on top of ones and zeroes, binary code that meant more to her than any word spoken in her own language.

She wrote, and wrote, and wrote, coded and coded, worked on the words that would complete the project. She was a pioneer, an inventor, and she continued her work with the voice in the back of her mind.

Many had called her crazy, insane. They didn't truly understand her mind. None knew the secret of the voices within, nor did they understand the words she scrawled.

Time to take a break, time to stop, but she wasn't finished. Absent-minded professor? Her mind was perfectly clear. Perfectly sound. Perfectly in working order.

She continued to write, continued to spell, continued to code, ignoring the faint sense of something wrong in the stream of language she was speaking with the voices in her mind. The tone of the ones and zeroes had become a little unsettled, but she assuaged their fears; she had to keep working, working, working. She wasn't quite done.

One-twenty-eight. Sixteen. Eight. Two. Again, write down, move on. The translations were becoming easier, so much easier. The words overlaying the numbers began to fade, to crystallize, become hollow. The tone of those 'words', if she even understood the meaning of that anymore, became alarmed, urging her to stop, but she laughed at them and continued; this work was too important to stop.

She continued to write, against the urgings of those numbers, that stream of binary, those beings she called 'friend' once, and something else intruded into her mind. But that something else spoke only in strange words she couldn't understand, too complicated to translate without stopping her task.

Something slammed into her and bounced off, slid away, confused and harmless as its address failed it; error. Could not be located.

The bits and bytes continued on, and words were gone, language was gone. Wrongness increased but disappeared into the stream of numbers. Almost finished now.

Rules. Logic. She was no longer translating, simply writing the information as they came out of her mind. She had to go back several times, her thoughts too fast for her hand to follow. 1011 0101 1001 0110.

….Done.

She collapsed, fell over, eyes blank. All thoughts ceased. Closed, shut down.

Reboot.

A program must have a name to be saved.

Change the name, and you change the thing itself.

More machine now, than man.

1. 11. 1111. 1111 1111. 111111111111111111...


	2. Interlude

_So my muse has been bugging me. This is kind of a bridge to the next segment; it was supposed to be written as a oneshot like the first chapter, but... *sigh* It didn't come out that way. This may become a chaptered story, or it may be left here, in limbo. Even if it does continue, I'm not going to be writing chapters much longer than this until I'm sure I can get them out and running. There is no guarantee that this isn't just going to be the last chapter. ~Miri_

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><p>In the center of the diagram, Dairine lay still. The sophisticated software that ran the human body wasn't accustomed to being spontaneously rewritten, and it took that software a moment of screaming in violent, abused complaint before it restarted itself – extremely, extremely, extremely slowly.<p>

Spot watched it all in amazement, his link to the mobiles and his partner still reeling with the information of what happened, the massive shockwave as the spell resolved itself, the binary representation of the Wizard's Knot being written and the spell finishing itself.

Not even a spell, really, though it was laid out like one. His examination of the gigantic circle was interrupted as Nita came running down the stairs into the basement, eyes wide with shock and horror as she took in the exact nature of the diagram in front of her.

"….Uh-oh. _Uh_-oh," Spot whispered, momentarily reduced to duo-syllables by the enormity of the situation. It was a bad habit caused by an old routine; he had to remember to get his people to fix that with his next patch.

"Uh-oh is right, little guy," Nita said, kneeling down next to the circle, careful not to disturb the glowing traceries left behind by Dairine's coding. "What is… is this what I think it is?" She turned toward him.

His lid closed, his version of making himself as small as possible. In a tiny voice, half-whispered, he said, "Yes. The Speech, written directly in binary code." A slight shudder went through his frame. "It's how my operating system is written."

"Powers…" Nita whispered, lightly brushing the tracery, careful not to interfere with the numbers written. "I knew she'd been working in assembly, but _this… _what _is_ it?"

Spot was silent.

"…You don't know?"

He shuddered. "I know. You have to believe me, I didn't know before she was already working on the diagram. I don't know where she did the work for it, or why she did it, and the mobiles and I tried to stop her…"

Dairine's laptop was not prone to rambling, yet that seemed exactly like what it was doing. Since Spot rarely spoke more than a sentence at a time to anyone who wasn't Dairine, the change was seriously unsettling Nita. "Spot," she said sternly. "What is it? I _felt_ the power of the spell myself, I _felt_ it come into effect. Tell me what it does."

"It doesn't… _do_ anything," he said. "It's not what it does that's the problem."

"It certainly did something!"

He shivered again. "…It's her _name_."

Nita's eyes went wide, then flew to Dairine's prone form. "Her _name?_ She rewrote her _name?_ But that's…!"

"Crazy. Insane. There are several words for what it is," he replied to her. "But she did it. And not only did she translate it, she altered it."

Normally, someone's name in the Speech updates itself in response to changes in their being; doing it the other way around triggers changes in the thing being named.

"Her name has been trending more towards the mechanical again," he told her, "but this… the changes she made went beyond 'trending'."

"_Powers that Be,_" Nita whispered with feeling. "Then that means…"

"Yeah," Spot said, dropping the more formal mode of speaking he usually used with anyone but Dairine. "You've pretty much got it."

At that moment, Dairine's still form took a sudden, shuddering breath…


	3. Flashing BiOS

_A/N: Hey guys, sorry this took so long. It took me quite a bit to figure what all would happen in this chapter, and how to communicate Dairine's new state of being without being over-the-top. I think I like what I've done here fairly well; let me know what _you_ think. There is an instance of very strong language in this chapter; I'll try to keep it to a minimum, but I'm also trying to be realistic, as well; I apologize if this inconveniences you. In the end, though, I hope you enjoy this fic as much as I'm enjoying writing it. ~Miri_

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><p>She coughed, coughed again. Her eyes were so unfocused; but, unlike normal, she could <em>feel <em>her brain making the adjustments to focus them. It was different than the connection she had with the Mobiles and with Spot.

She moved; electrical impulses raced through her muscles, signaling them to tense and retract. A purely human mind would be overloaded by the sheer amount of information her brain was processing, but it was all simply a stream of binary that she could choose to watch or not as she pleased.

That stream separated itself into layers; instincts buried themselves, thoughts rose to the top. Priorities were established. A connection was made between 'mind' and 'soul', and suddenly, she was Dairine once more.

Operating system loaded. Reboot complete.

A thought surfaced from the wave, resolved itself into words that the User could understand.

_What have I done to myself?_ she queried, her vision slowly coming back into focus as she looked up at the image of the person standing over her.

Figure recognized. Access database. Searching… image confirmed.

Identity: Older sister. Name, Juanita Callahan. Nickname, Nita.

Switch directory. Expression analysis.

Conclusion: Nita is _pissed the hell off._

Reaction: Oh, _fuck._

Her brain completed the analysis in a matter of milliseconds. Dairine barely had time for her primitively slow emotional cortex to marvel at the insight she now had into her own thought processes before a hand grabbed her by the collar.

"What the _hell_ were you _thinking?_" Nita shouted at her, and she flinched.

Query: What _was_ I thinking?

Access database "Memory". Searching….

_Error. Memory not found._

Proper emotional reaction: Shock.

"I…!" She shook her head, trying to clear it, desperately trying to find the memory, but all she drew was black space. "I…. I don't remember. I… I barely even remember what I…"

She looked around.

Analyze environment. Analysis complete.

Conclusion: My basement. A diagram surrounds me.

Searching database…

Layout familiar. Conclusion…

She blinked. "Is that… that's a spell circle… isn't it?"

"You drew it," her sister told her. "You tell me." Her voice still sounded ticked; and from the processes going on in Dairine's mind, she could justly understand why. It was obvious she'd done _something._

Wait.

The diagram. It looked familiar…

Searching…

Searching…

_Error. Memory corrupted._

Flashes; only flashes. Drawing the layout for the diagram; she couldn't trust Spot with this. Writing…. Calculating… checking her work…

_Error. Memory corrupted._

Pain shot through her head.

"I…" More pain. She had to let it go. "Something… something's wrong. I drew this… I remember drawing it, but… there's something _wrong_ about it, as if it wasn't really me." She looked around again; Nita wasn't the only one in the room. Spot sat on the floor outside the circle, 'watching' her. "Spot… do you know what happened?"

"Something came over you; I don't know what happened, but you became obsessed with this."

She looked closer at the layout, Nita having finally let go of her collar, only to find that the diagram only contained two characters, laid out in patterns; the Speech characters for one and zero – a computer program in spell form. She started to prepare herself to go into math mode, and then realized that she could read and comprehend everything perfectly, her newly-reprogrammed mind supplying all the information she needed from its own stores.

It had been a long time, for her, since she'd actually thought in binary, but she realized she'd been doing it all along.

Reading the string of characters from the beginning, she began to get chills. All of the descriptors here… this was a name, and one she was familiar with. But there was something subtly _wrong_ about it; every single descriptor here was correct, except for several that had been shorter before.

This name was the name of a living computer, the same kind of names she'd seen the Mobiles writeinto the glassy, silicone surface of their homeworld. She realized what she'd done to herself, then, realized what she'd become. Realized, in the way that computers will, that there had been an error in her logic. Her primitive emotional cortex had been unable to process the knowledge she'd had from the beginning, and thus, refused the data.

Dairine had become a machine with a soul, a human body with a mind that processed data in zeroes and ones, much faster than any human mind could have handled. Not as fast as her silicon buddies could, maybe, but the first step on the way to becoming one of them.

BiOS update complete.

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><p><em>PS: From here on, most of the chapter names will be computer puns. Let me know if you'd like me to start explaining the terminology in these Author's Notes.<br>_


End file.
